Year of Dreams, Nightmares

1998 was a year when soaring success went hand-in-hand with tragic failure and humbling disgrace.

When dreams of farmlands preserved and decades-old wishes for a four-year university came true. But it was also a year when a respected judge’s personal torment was revealed to the world as he lost his battle with alcohol--then traced the problem to memories of Vietnam.

Homeowners tallied their winnings as the boom-bust housing market boomed once more. The local port bustled, but a promising politician’s career was destroyed when he was caught tearing down a rival’s campaign signs at 3 a.m., then lied about it.

An unrepentant killer was brought to justice for the grisly murder of his long-suffering wife, while another woman who trusted in the law to protect her died at the hands of her bullying boyfriend.

In the ongoing struggle over how to teach immigrant children, schools were ordered by voters to instruct their students in English, but many found a way around it.

In athletics, a high school coach won more basketball games than anyone in state history, and a 21-year-old boxer overcame Olympic disappointment to capture a world championship.

It was the year El Nino’s storms battered oceanfront homes, crushed hillside apartments and swamped creek-side houses as rainfall broke records. Damage exceeded $50 million, but no one was killed.

With this baggage, it’s hard to call 1998 a good year. But it was hardly a miserable year to those of us who prospered. So let’s just call it a year.

A University Is Born

Thirty-five years in the making, Ventura County’s first four-year public university was born in September when Cal State regents decided to turn a mothballed mental hospital into the system’s 23rd campus.

Voices cracking and eyes damp with emotion, two busloads of university backers stood as one to applaud the decision.

“This is a full commitment to the 23rd campus--there’s no turning back,” said Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed.

The old Spanish-style Camarillo State Hospital always looked like a university anyway, with red-tiled roofs, arched hallways and a classic bell tower. Come September, it will act like one, too.

First, the sprawling campus located down a narrow road at the edge of the Oxnard Plain will be the new home for the 1,600-student Ventura extension of Cal State Northridge. In a few years, as enrollment climbs to 6,000 and state money is set aside, Cal State University Channel Islands will become a full-fledged, free-standing university.

Backers are bullish about the prospects of rapid growth, because the November election brought an array of politicians keenly aware of the need. They include state Sen. Jack O’Connell, new Education Secretary Gary Hart, a former teacher in Oxnard and former Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz, who is head of Gov. Gray Davis’ transition team.

What a Cal State campus will mean to local students cannot be overstated, backers say. For too long, too many students here have ended their educations after community college because it was too costly or too difficult to go to a four-year university.

“This makes all the difference in the world,” said longtime booster Carolyn Leavens. “This has become Ventura County’s field of dreams.”

Saving Open Space

No one doubted Ventura County’s love affair with farmland and open space.

After all, the county bulges with big-city refugees.

But who could have predicted the resoundingly clear, precise statement voters would make about the top political issue of 1998.

From the newer communities of the east county to the older towns of the west, they put a halt to suburbia’s sprawl by enacting one of the nation’s most revolutionary sets of land-use controls.

More than two of every three voters in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Camarillo and Oxnard took city expansion out of the hands of elected officials and gave it to those they trusted more--themselves.

Countywide, 63% of voters declared unincorporated open space off-limits to developers until 2020. Ventura did much the same in 1995. And a similar measure is on the ballot in Moorpark next month.

The initiative shepherds in a period of trial and error.

It promises new life to aging business districts and neighborhoods, because cities that can no longer grow outward must now turn inward. With land at a premium, abandoned shops gain value and vacant lots hold promise.

But will residents accept more people living and working on less space next door? Where will companies settle when business parks are full? Will there be jobs and homes for those new graduates of the new four-year university?

“It looks like we’re going to save open space,” said William Fulton of Ventura, publisher of a statewide planning newsletter. “But the question is whether residents are really going to accept growth inside their boundaries.

“If they do, then we have economic vitality ahead of us,” he said. “If they don’t, we’re going to become one big upper-middle class suburb or we’re going to stagnate.”

A Judge’s Disgrace

The year began with hope for Superior Court Judge Robert Bradley as he graduated from a program to control his addiction to alcohol.

Within days, he resumed a yearlong free fall.

The result was six arrests for crimes stemming from his struggle with alcohol and divorce, two drunk-driving convictions and a six-month term in jail. It could all end with his banishment from the bench for life.

Bradley’s fall from grace was tragic in the classic meaning of the word. Friends and colleagues vouched for his ability and hard work as a judge. He is the most decent of men, they said, even as they came to fear what he might do while drunk.

Discussing his estranged wife and her male friend, Bradley told a colleague: “Maybe I ought to blow them both away.”

Just this month, he admitted his failures to a three-judge panel appointed by the state Commission on Judicial Performance. But he offered as an explanation the horror he experienced in the Vietnam War, which prompted him to drink.

“I’ve humiliated myself. I’ve been a humiliation to the court,” the 57-year-old judge testified. “Sometimes I think I wouldn’t blame [my colleagues] if they didn’t want to talk to me again.”

Instead, some of the county’s top legal authorities said they would welcome Bradley back as a temporary judge if he could stay sober.

After judging Bradley’s misconduct, the panel will submit its recommendations to the judicial commission. A ruling is expected next spring.

Meanwhile, Bradley remains in a court-ordered rehabilitation program until May.

A Verdict for Sherri

He smiled. He swaggered. He wore his haughty, unrepentant nature on his face.

His own attorney described Michael Dally as a “rotten guy” who treated his wife, Sherri, abominably.

During a murder trial that captured the attention of not just Ventura County but all of Southern California, prosecutors depicted the 37-year-old Dally as a drug-using grocery clerk who preyed on weak women, bought sex from prostitutes and finally convinced one of his conquests--Diana Haun--to savagely kill his wife so he could avoid a costly divorce.

“Michael Dally was not only bad, but bad in your face,” former prosecutor Kevin DeNoce said.

That is why spectators cheered in a courthouse hallway when a jury decided Dally had directed his brain-damaged lover to murder his loyal wife, the dedicated mother of his two young sons.

With little hard, direct evidence linking him to the 1996 murder, jurors convicted Dally partly because he was such a despicable guy, legal analysts said.

When the verdict was announced, Dally stood with his chin high and his back straight. His dead wife’s relatives collapsed into one another’s arms. Dally’s father and two nieces looked stunned--and were left to tell Devon, 10, and Max, 8, what had happened to their dad.

As with Haun, in a previous trial, jurors opted for life in prison, not death.

The Haun jurors said the ax-wielding clerk would not have killed had it not been for her scheming lover. Dally jurors never explained their sentence.

But lawyers say privately that Dally was saved because jurors did not want to leave his motherless sons without a father as well.

Bidding Up the Price

It took a decade, but the frenzy of the 1980s housing boom returned in 1998.

Customers queued up for days at new subdivisions in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo. Bidders raced to buy tiny houses in old neighborhoods in Ventura. When the market finally settled, sales were up 26% from 1997 and prices had surged 9%.

Home-buying fueled a continuing economic recovery that withstood the ripples of Asia’s crisis to create thousands of new jobs and spawn an array of building projects.

Among Southland counties, Ventura was second only to San Diego in leading the regional real estate rebound.

With a projected 14,550 sales this year, housing turnover was the highest since it peaked in 1988. And many homeowners recouped huge equity losses suffered with the market collapse of the early ‘90s.

“Next year looks just as good,” analyst John Karevoll said. “We have activity in all categories and all communities. There is nothing ominous that we can see.”

At either end of the county, cities gave the green light to construction.

Industrial parks filled up, and a new one was built at the top of the Conejo Grade.

In Simi Valley, Wal-Mart, Home Depot and a 16-screen movie complex got the go-ahead. Camarillo continued its Outlet Mall expansions. Oxnard countered with a huge green Auto Nation. And Ventura sped forward with a downtown movie theater and parking garage and the $100-million upgrade of the Buenaventura Mall.

Already a growing economic center, the tiny Port of Hueneme surpassed 1 million tons of cargo for the first time, up 32% in a year, thanks to a Navy permit to use one of its berths. Further growth is expected in 1999 after the 61-year-old port doubled its acreage just this month.

Yet, our love-hate relationship with new development was highlighted in Moorpark. The City Council approved this county’s largest housing project in years. But voters may still say no to the 3,221-house Hidden Creek community next month.

And despite Ventura County’s hand-wringing over traffic and water, Los Angeles County approved a new 75,000-resident city on our eastern flank.

El Nino’s Wrath

The storms came early and stayed late.

During one month--February--they turned the county into a mess of mud and flood water.

Monster waves washed through oceanfront living rooms, a sliding hillside pancaked a Ventura apartment house and churning flood waters closed the region’s main rail line and busiest freeway.

Thirty-five roads closed for days or weeks or months.

In east Ojai, homeowners were swamped twice. In Santa Paula, thousands of residents fled a rising creek. Water flowed 4 inches deep in the corridors of Camarillo’s City Hall.

Rainfall was nearly three times normal as storms raced across a warm Pacific Ocean and slammed into the land. About 62 inches of rain fell at Matilija Dam, and 40 inches at the government center in Ventura. Up to 9 inches fell on one mountainside in one day.

When it was over, damage exceeded $50 million. Farmers lost the most, since rainfall covered thousands of acres of cropland for days.

One Fillmore rancher estimated his losses at $1 million as the raging Santa Clara River changed course and swallowed 45 of his acres. “It just kept rising, and there was nothing I could do about it,” said Chap Morris Jr., part owner of the ranch and the William L. Morris auto dealership. “I’m selling a car right now to pay for the damage.”

Thousand Oaks still is paying a price.

On the fifth day of storms, a surge of water snapped a sewer main, releasing a torrent of untreated effluent. The spill lasted 10 days and grew to 89 million gallons. State regulators slapped a record $2.3-million fine on the city, charging political divisions on the City Council prevented repairs on the pipeline.

The city has appealed.

Caught in the Act

Things hadn’t gone Rich Sybert’s way for a while.

The 46-year-old Harvard-educated lawyer had lost two close races for Congress and spent a lot of his own money doing it.

So the former planning director for Gov. Pete Wilson set his sights a bit lower, on the state Assembly.

He figured to win the Republican primary for a seat Republicans had never lost.

Then he self-destructed.

As a cameraman captured a scene later broadcast nationwide, Sybert ripped apart opponent Tony Strickland’s campaign posters. Then he lied about it.

“I checked with my wife, and she’s pretty sure the guy next to her Monday night was me,” Sybert said.

Strickland produced the videotape. Sybert apologized. He said he tore down Strickland’s signs because they were posted illegally and Thousand Oaks officials had not forced their removal. But voters didn’t care to hear his explanations. Sybert finished fourth in the five-candidate primary. Strickland, only 28, came in first and eventually won the general election.

Sybert later paid a $1,000 city fine for tearing down the signs and announced an end to a political career that once looked so promising.

“This settlement allows me to move on with my life,” Sybert said. “I’m tired of seeing my name in the newspaper.”

A System Fails

Vicki Shade did everything right.

She called the police. She got a restraining order. She carried a cell phone so she could call for help in emergencies.

But it didn’t matter.

She was killed earlier this month--the victim of a violent boyfriend who wouldn’t let her go and a system that would not keep him away from her.

After the hairstylist kicked Roland Sheehan out of the east Ventura home they owned last summer, he threatened to kill her. Those threats only escalated when he was jailed for stalking and for making repeated threats on her life.

Still, he walked out of jail after posting a $20,000 bail, far below the automatic $150,000 that surrounding counties levy in stalking cases.

That Sheehan had an extensive criminal past--including murder charges, armed robbery and sexual assault--didn’t really matter. Records of those Rhode Island offenses had all been lost years ago.

So when the unemployed construction worker broke into Shade’s condo at 6 a.m. Dec. 4, the deeply religious mother of three was defenseless. He held her hostage for nine hours, then stabbed her to death as SWAT officers stormed the house.

Police shot and killed Sheehan as he lunged at them with the butcher knife he had just plunged into Shade’s chest.

“I’m just so sorry my daughter was so lonely that she fell for someone like this,” Mary Frances Shade said. “She really had that hope that love could straighten him out.”

Shade left behind three daughters, one by Sheehan and two by a former husband. And a legacy of legal reform.

With her death in mind, Ventura County judges last week increased the bail to $100,000 for extreme cases of domestic violence.

Se Hablan Ingles?

Voters may have thought they spoke clearly in June when they backed a ballot measure intended to end bilingual instruction in public schools.

The new law, which passed here with a two-thirds majority and with 61% of votes statewide, requires schools to teach students almost entirely in English.

But Proposition 227 also allowed parents of limited-English students with “special” educational needs better met in bilingual classes to pull their children out of English immersion classrooms after 30 days.

In half a dozen districts in the Ventura and Oxnard area, between 60% and 90% of children who speak little English have flooded back to bilingual classes. Nearly all are native Spanish speakers.

But in some local districts with large numbers of Spanish-speaking students--Fillmore and Santa Paula in particular-- few parents returned their children to bilingual classes.

“If you have a successful bilingual program . . . the parents will continue to support that bilingual program,” said Supt. Yolanda Benitez, in whose Rio District 83% of limited-English students reenrolled in bilingual classes.

Critics, however, say some districts went out of their way to sell bilingual education to parents to get around the intent of the new law.

Either way, the results have shown again that the broad strokes of politics can give way to the ambiguities of law and administration.

That may not have been what the voters intended, but it was a welcome relief to Margo Arellano, who said in October that her son, Alexis, 6, pleaded to go back to a bilingual classroom.

“He would come home with stomach aches and crying because he couldn’t understand what was going on,” the mother said in Spanish.

Champions, Young and Old

In Fernando Vargas and Lou Cvijanovich, you have the fire of youth and the perspective of age.

Within a few days of each other this month, Cvijanovich, 72, set the record for most victories by a prep basketball coach in California and Vargas, 21, captured a world junior middleweight boxing championship.

Cvijanovich, whose Santa Clara High School teams have twice won state titles, beat Carpinteria for his 803rd victory in 41 seasons. Hundreds of fans of the Oxnard school rose and cheered. Cvijanovich, known for telling his players the virtues of blocking out distractions, kept his characteristic stone-faced expression in place.

“I’m very happy,” he said. “It’s our fourth victory of the season.”

Vargas knew defeat from his upset loss at the Summer Olympics in 1996. And he knew hardship from the long road his immigrant parents traveled to afford a nice house near Channel Islands High School--from which Vargas graduated, the first member of his family to do so.

But it was the fire in his belly that led him to take a title fight two weeks ago against champion Yory Boy Campas, who had lost just twice in 74 decisions.

Although Vargas had won all of his 14 pro fights by knockout, analysts said he was moving up too fast. In the end, Vargas gave the veteran a boxing lesson, landing three punches for every one he took.

“A lot of people thought I couldn’t do it,” he said after the fight. “What do you think of me now?”

The Oxnard City Council responded by giving the onetime playground tough a key to the city.